Existing methods for delivery of products from a central warehouse or processing facility to retail shelves include a number of inefficiencies.
Stacking products on shelves, particularly in a retail environment, is a labour intensive exercise. Typically, articles to be stacked on retail shelves are provided from a storage facility in boxes on pallets. The articles are usually unpacked from individual boxes and manually lifted onto a trolley or shopping cart and sorted (again manually) into the appropriate shelving space. Therefore, products that are required at any particular point on the shelf must be located from a jumble of articles in the cart or trolley.
With perishable products, such as meat, the time taken to perform the retail distribution process is important to product quality. The longer the meat is exposed to ambient temperatures, the lower its quality and the shorter its shelf life.
There is often a substantial amount of manual lifting required to lift objects from boxes onto a cart or trolley, and then from the cart or trolley onto retail shelves Which may be up to a meter higher than the position of the product in the cart. This manual lifting of articles to be stacked may occur many times throughout a shelf stacking process, for example products needing to be lifted from a delivery vehicle such as a truck for example, onto a pallet and then being lifted again from the pallet into the shelves.